Sex Slavery Flourishing In Kosovo, U.n. Reports

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia — The trafficking of East European women into sexual slavery, one of the major criminal scourges of post-Communist Europe, is becoming a serious problem in Kosovo.

Porous borders, the presence of international troops and aid workers and the lack of a working criminal justice system have created almost perfect conditions for the trade, U.N. police officers, NATO-led peacekeepers and humanitarian workers say.

In the past six months, U.N. police and peacekeeping troops have rescued 50 women -- Moldovan, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and Romanian -- from brothels that have begun to appear in cities and towns in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia. Police and aid workers fear hundreds more, lured from their impoverished homelands with the promise of riches, may be living in sexual servitude.

"These women have been reduced to slavery," said Col. Vincenzo Coppola, regiment commander of the Italian Carabineri, a police force with military powers in Kosovo that has rescued 23 women in Pristina and Prizren.

According to police sources and aid workers, the women -- some as young as 15 -- were transported along a well-established, organized-crime network from Eastern Europe to Macedonia, which borders Kosovo to the south. There, they were held in motels and sold to ethnic Albanian pimps in auctions for $1,000 to $2,500. The pimps work under the protection of major crime figures in Kosovo, officials said.

The women were stripped of their passports as soon as they left their homelands and were then frequently held in unheated rooms with primitive sanitary conditions in Kosovo and forced to have unprotected sex, sometimes up to 16 times a night for no payment, according U.N. police officers who spoke to the women and requested anonymity because of U.N. regulations limiting their ability to talk to the media.

Police, peacekeepers and aid workers here have been slow to respond to the problem. The undermanned U.N. police force is hard-pressed by a variety of criminal activities, and there are limited humanitarian resources to protect the women once they seek sanctuary.

Moreover, officials said, the trade has flourished because of a lack of applicable law on trafficking or prostitution and because some countries with military forces here have tended to dismiss the activity as simple prostitution. German peacekeepers in southern Kosovo, for instance, have taken a benign view of the phenomenon in part because prostitution is tolerated in Germany; international aid workers are trying to convince them that these women are victims.

"It's not classic prostitution," said one international aid worker who has interviewed the rescued women and is working on a draft U.N. regulation to punish people involved in the slave trade. "They are not paid. They are never paid. Of the 50 women we have seen, not one has received a single deutschemark. And they are often held in horrendous conditions."

According to authorities, the women were told that before they could keep any of their earnings, they had to pay off the pimps for their purchase price. Often, however, they found themselves fined for infractions such as not smiling at customers, so there was no way they would ever have enough money to complete the payoff. The women said that if they protested, they were beaten.

Kosovo, which had some local prostitution but no trafficking problem before the peacekeepers arrived, is just another new market, officials said.

"The women we've spoken to left their countries of their own volition and basically knew they would work as prostitutes," said a U.N. police officer in Gnjilane. "But they thought they could earn thousands of dollars in some exotic location like Italy or Spain and then go home rich. Instead, they end up imprisoned here without a dime."